I’m suffering from some kind of existential artist angst. I spend most of my time at work brainstorming the Perfect Idea, the book or whatever that is the best thing I could possibly ever write, but the result is that now I have way too many ideas and trouble committing myself to a single one.

And then I’ll start working on an idea and it’ll shift or change or refuse to be pinned down. And then I think that everything has been done already anyway, so why bother doing anything at all?

And then there’s the problem of people reacting to my work and freaking me out. Like in my last Subcutaneous post, someone saying “You have an excellent wit sir. I love reading these.” Argh! He’s like some random guy appreciating my work. I don’t know how to handle that, and yet presumably it’s exactly what I want as a writer.

No wonder I’ve been burying myself in consumerism lately, it’s a passive and easy way to assert some kind of identity.

Blah. The way I wrote Pirate Space may have been flawed, but at least it worked. I wrote a whole bunch of random scenes, knitted them together into a story and rewrote the entire thing based around that story.

I’ve been trying to write another novel by cutting out the first part and jumping straight to the bit where I write a novel based around the story. It doesn’t seem to be working. For some reason my creative process involves paradoxes. I need to write before I can think of a story, and I need to think of a story before I can write. And what seems to me like wasting time writing stuff that I don’t intend to print is actually an important part of writing stuff I do intend to print.

I need to sort out my writing. I think it’s evolved since I wrote Pirate Space. For the better or worse I don’t know. I’ve been having trouble writing Subcutaneous because I naturally write the chapters how I used to write rather than how I should be writing now. If that makes sense.

I like The Clash more that I’ve stopped associating them with my annoying neighbour.

On friday morning I woke up an hour earlier before work than I usually do. That mean I lay in bed for an hour contemplating the fact that I was about to go to work. It depressed me quite a bit. Usually I just wake up and get dressed and go to work and don’t really have time to think about it. I guess the fact that most mornings I didn’t have to think about going to work was keeping me sane.

I got annoyed with myself. I’d spent so much time working on publishing Pirate Space on Lulu that I’d naturally assumed I’d publish all my books the same way. I’d forgotten that writing a book with the intention of seriously submitting it to actual publishers was a course still open to me.

I’d been writing book #2 specifically to have it self-published. There’s no reason I couldn’t write book #2 to have it submitted to a publisher and then published on Lulu if that failed. That way I won’t be burning a bridge I have no real reason to burn other than a rather idiotic sense of pride.

So. I’m going to put that book aside and only pick it up again if I start having any success on Lulu. Instead I’m going to write a book with the intention of impressing publishers. Because the horror of work can make anyone a sell-out.

One thing that Teletraan I (the Transformers wiki) has that Brickipedia (the Lego wiki) doesn’t is a sense of humour. Where the latter is very dry and informative, the former is quite happy to poke fun at the eccentricities of it subject. This excerpt, from the entry on a rather ugly Galvatron toy, for example:

“The tank shows very little purple on its hull, presumably to keep it a reasonably realistic representation of a real-life tank. The tank likewise has a giant translucent orange laser cannon that can fire a translucent orange missile, also keeping in the spirit of realistic alt-modes.”

So I was bothered to read the box at the top of this page and realise that there will always be people who object to the having of ‘fun’ in something so important as the online encyclopedia of a children’s toy.